If you don't report a failure every week, you are a failure

In this household, if you don't report a failure every week, you are a failure.

Growing up, Sara Blakely's father asked her and her brother almost every week, at the dinner table:

What did you fail at?

If neither of them had an answer, he looked genuinely disappointed. A real, spectacular failure, the kind that came from actually attempting something hard, earned a high-five instead.

The rule flipped the usual incentive completely. In most households, failure gets hidden and success gets reported. At Blakely's table, having nothing to report was the actual failure, and a good story about a real attempt gone wrong was the win.

Blakely turned $5,000 in savings into Spanx.

At 41, that made her the youngest self-made woman on the Forbes Billionaires list, built with no outside investment, no debt, and without spending a dollar on advertising.

None of that came from a childhood free of real failure. It came from a home where failure was cheap to report and expensive to avoid.

Most people don't fail less than Sara Blakely did. They just learned earlier than she did to hide it, which means they stopped generating the kind of failures that only come from actually trying something.

What would change on your team if a real, honest failure earned a higher five than a safe non-attempt?

Harsh

I build businesses with extraordinary people. I share my learnings daily on my WhatsApp Community and LinkedIn, and weekly on this Sunday Email.